A Study of Young C. L. R. James and Trinidadian Context in the Early Twentieth Century

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE A Study of Young C. L. R. James and Trinidadian Context in the Early Twentieth Century A Study of Young C. L. R. James and Trinidadian Context in the Early Twentieth Century Katsunori KAJIHARA Growing interest has been attracted to the West Indian novelist, historian, and critic, C. L. R. James since the rise of so-called “British Cultural Studies.” Many biographies of James, accordingly, are available now, in addition to his own autobiographical criticism on cricket Beyond a Boundary and his letters to Constance Webb. However, less attention has been paid to the environment as a whole that nurtured his unique stance to the contemporary problematics, though many critics refer to individual memories of him about his family, what he read in his school days, and cricket. Early in the twentieth century, Trinidad produced many talented intellectuals whose influence remains even today. Why did such talented thinkers appear in the same place at the same time? If Trinidad, as Eric Williams charged in his History of the People of the Trinidad & Tobago, was based on sugar workers and needed only sugar workers, not citizens, what was the driving force that gave rise to the limited but in some respects prominent intellectuals? The purpose of this paper is to clarify the local and historical situation of Trinidad from the turn of twenties century to 1920s in which not only James but West Indian intellectuals in general were brought up. Towards the end of nineteenth century, there appeared new criteria which became the basis of social ranking within the black community in Trinidad. It is true that color and ethnicity was most important of them, but with the growth of the professions and the civil service, education and opportunities which education provided began to assume ever greater significance in the twentieth century. At the top of this status hierarchy were the university educated professionals, below them the more educated of the civil servants, and, still lower, the primary school teachers who had been trained by the ─ 45 ─ 愛知県立大学外国語学部紀要第48号（言語・文学編） “student teacher” method, which was supplemented with a course in the local teachers’ training college. In 1901 two members of the new stratum of “black” primary school teachers in the Arima district of Trinidad, east of Port of Spain acquired sons who would make their mark on the world in a different profession from theirs. One was Cyril Lionel James and the other Malcom Nurse; both would achieve distinction as professional revolutionary organizers and intellectuals. The fathers of the pair were good friends. The James family was descended from the class of free colored artisans; James’s grandfather had been a respected and first black engineer on the government railroad.1 Later James’s young brother, Eric would continue in the family occupational tradition and become an important railway official himself. The father of Nurse was also an exceptionally successful colored man by the standards of the colonial society of the period, for he served as an Agricultural Advisor to the government Department of Education.2 The young James and Nurse were casual friends in their boyhood. Writing many years later, James nostalgically recalled that they had together explored their rural and forested environment, tramping along the base of the Northern Range and bathing in the Arima River.3 Both of them eventually attended secondary school. James was a precocious boy and won an exhibition at nine to Queen’s Royal College (henceforth referred to as Q.R.C); Nurse attended St. Mary’s College. Opportunities for secondary education had not increased very much by 1911, the year in which James and Nurse were preparing to embark on their secondary school education. Secondary education was expensive, straining the limited resources of the colored middle class and practically out of the question for the children of parents living in regions so remote from the urban centers as to make necessary the boarding of their children in town. The official scholarship was a bridge between primary and secondary school, and from the latter to a university education abroad. The government itself provided only four free places in the secondary schools, and the university scholarships for the United Kingdom numbered only three annually.4 However, quality of the secondary school instruction was, in comparison to the ordinary level in the primary schools, deemed to be extraordinarily ─ 46 ─ A Study of Young C. L. R. James and Trinidadian Context in the Early Twentieth Century high. On this point there is the testimony of a leading West Indian educator who would be the first Prime Minister in Trinidad, that is, Eric Williams himself. As an alumnus of the system, he later wrote that both Q. R. C. and St. Mary’s had a staff and curriculum which was the equal of the British public schools after which both were modelled. Classical literature, languages, geography, mathematics, history—even a course in West Indian history— were all taught. Besides, the fact that the colony’s secondary schools were the first colonial institutions to participate in the external examinations of Oxford and Cambridge was quite important in accounting for the high level of competitive scholarship in Trinidad.5 Thus identical criteria for performance were established for the local scholars, whose work was thereby ranked and locally acclaimed in an inter-Empire educational system. The Trinidad scholar did well, according to Eric Williams, who graduated from Q. R. C. and wrote later in a newspaper article dealing with the social anatomy on the island in the year of his birth: …One of the island scholars of 1911 was placed first among 57 candidates in the British Empire in Agricultural Science …He gained distinction in five subjects; so did four other students in the Empire, one in Ceylon, three in England. Of 83 candidates who gained distinction in history, four were from Trinidad … At the 1910 examinations one island scholar from Queen’s Royal College was placed first in the Senior Cambridge examinations throughout the Empire, whilst another from St. Mary’s College topped the candidates in the entrance examination to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.6 Another avenue of advancement for the secondary school graduate who had been unable to obtain a university scholarship was to go to the United States and attempt to work his way through a university. Malcom Nurse took this route in the 1920s.7 And then there was cricket. Inter-colonial cricket had been inaugurated in Trinidad in 1893, the year in which the elite Queen’s Park Oval Club was organized. In 1895 a team from England had been beaten by all-Trinidad side; two years later, during the centennial celebrations of ─ 47 ─ 愛知県立大学外国語学部紀要第48号（言語・文学編） British rule, cricket was prominent on the agenda, and in 1900 the first West Indian team visited England. Cricket clubs, and the inevitable village cricket pitch, could be found all over Trinidad. Everyone knew the game; young C. L. R. James was a cricket fanatic, and so was Learie Constantine, whose father had himself been an outstanding exponent of the game. In the 1920s Learie Constantine went to England to play in the County league for Nelson in Lancashire. He soon established a reputation as being one of the best “all- rounders” that the game had ever seen, a sportsman of legendary prowess and one of the early heralds of the phenomenal ability that West Indians were to bring to the game. In his cricket memoirs, Beyond a Boundary, James provides glimpses into such facets of the period as the Puritanical code impressed on the Q. R. C. school boy, the metropolitan sophistication of a group of local intellectuals and litterateurs, and the manner in which membership in the various local cricket clubs was determined by very fine class and color distinctions. The excellence of the cricket played was a product of the sublimated class conflict which found an outlet in the keen rivalries between the clubs; also of importance was the ready, informal availability of top players for matches at every level. A self-confident, robust, uninhibited national character for which cricket provided a disciplined, formalized, means of expression took shape under the veneer of class and caste. West Indian social conditions of the period, particularly in Trinidad, according to James, were analogous to the vigorous, pre-Victorian ethos which had produced W. G. Grace and the modern game of cricket: an England still unconquered by the Industrial Revolution, not finicky in morals, committed to enjoying life with gusto.8 The parallel, if tenuous, is nevertheless fascinating. In Trinidad the lively, competitive, innovative neighborhood organizations of the urban conditions had counterparts in many areas of the countryside. Tunapuna, the native district of James, Constantine and Nurse, had been descried by Dom Basil Matthews as a frontier town, intensely clannish, and united as a semi-secret organization against outsiders. The cultural background and the subconscious origins of the intense populist faith which James developed into a unique method of revolutionary ─ 48 ─ A Study of Young C. L. R. James and Trinidadian Context in the Early Twentieth Century organization during his years as a sectarian radical are suggested in this portrayal, by Matthews, of the Trinidad from which he emerged: Beneath the geographico-economic conditions of the village neighborhood, human factor was active and creative. The flight of runaway slaves and the forging or assimilation of novel kinship links (godparent relationships) in the social pattern, to say nothing of the development of folk literature, are evidence of creative activity. Nevertheless, the neighborhood, that is, the village, frequently cast or drawn into the shadow of the plantation, largely conditioned and also determined the structure, form and expression of the traditional Trinidad family and society.

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